Hard-boiled Egghead

As perhaps befits a man who never received anything but D's in
school for classroom conduct, the oddly cantankerous yet charming Roger
Schank, a world leader in artificial intelligence and (some think)
visionary of educational software, insists that no one has the right to
tell students what to learn or how to learn it.

Sitting in his corner office before a coffee table strewn with the
Styrofoam refuse of a carryout lunch, the 48-year-old director of
Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences gleefully
attacks state education mandates, standardized tests, and computer
programs that ask students to "blast'' verbs as if they were in some
kind of electronic shooting gallery. The enemy, as Schank sees it, is
the prescribed curriculum--a kind of speed trap designed to stop kids
who are all too avidly chasing their own interests. The American way,
Schank believes, is to let people travel in their chosen directions;
learning, he argues, should be about the pursuit of happiness. "Fun is
always valuable,'' he says. "If it's not fun, you won't learn it.''

Creating computer programs that are both "fun'' and educationally
sound, as opposed to those that are only divertingly entertaining, has
been the institute's raison d'être since Schank, in conjunction
with Northwestern and Andersen Consulting, founded it in 1989. Its
educational software, still being refined, is currently in place in six
Chicago-area school districts, and Schank and his colleagues are
exploring ways to market it nationally. The institute also produces
job-training software embodying similar educational principles for
Andersen and other high-powered sponsors such as Ameritech and the U.S.
Defense Department.

Students using institute-designed computer programs edit and produce
newscasts, create dancing bears and flying fish, and cruise the
interstate highway system. It's all very different from traditional
schooling, which, Schank says, is still about making people "remember
stuff that won't stick around.''

"Cultural-literacy people are the modern-day American Nazis,'' he
asserts. He places in this group all self-appointed standard-bearers of
the American curriculum. "They're sitting there saying, 'I know what
you need to know, and you'll know what I say.' Did you ever look at
what's on that list? I don't know most of that stuff. It's someone
arbitrarily deciding that everyone should know this Eskimo folk tale.
That's ridiculous. What are they going to do? Drill it into peoples'
heads and test them to see if they know it?''

What then, if not a sanctified body of knowledge, should students
study? Schank likes to talk about what he calls the "truck
curriculum.'' Most elementary school boys love trucks, he points out.
Why not let these youngsters load them, drive them, smash them, and
repair them? They'd have fun and learn something along the way.
Smashing trucks and calculating load weights could, for example, teach
students something about mathematics and physics. Transporting freight
across the country could teach them something about geography, the
nation's highway system, and the duties of a dispatcher.

Of course, constructing such a learning situation in an ordinary
classroom is problematic: Smashing trucks can be disruptive and
destructive. Here is where the computer comes in. Schank believes that
the computer's interactive and simulative capabilities make almost
anything possible. A kid can smash atoms or design a spaceship that
will fly to Mars, just as pilots in a flight simulator--Schank's
favorite computerized invention--can combat wind shear without worrying
about a fatal crash.

A computer "course,'' then, according to Schank, can be created out
of almost anything that interests students. Its goal should be to teach
skills rather than to impart information, though students will of
course acquire information as they need it to perform a given task.
Schank contends--and cognitive research supports him on this
point--that information is retained only if discovered in useful
contexts.

In one of his many published articles (he is also the author of
numerous books), Schank envisions a high school or college course
called "Cure the Diabetic'' that could augment or even replace the
standardized lectures and textbooks of the traditional biology class.
The computer program would let students consult with patients--the
software having "stockpiled'' a myriad of cases--perform simulated lab
tests, and, after gathering and studying the results, suggest a course
of treatment.

An institute software program paralleling "Cure the Diabetic''
actually exists. That program, Sickle Cell Counselor, was created
specifically for Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, which
requested an interactive multimedia program to replace the frequently
ignored wall-to-wall text. Sickle Cell Coun-selor asks the user to
advise couples who are worried about passing the sickle-cell gene on to
their children. After learning about a given couple's concerns and
medical histories, the user can ask a doctor, geneticist, or lab
technician up to 40 questions about the disease. The user might
inquire, for example, about the symptoms or who is at risk. He or she
might ask a technician to demonstrate the use of a syringe and help
"draw'' blood. Once lab results are attained, the user, with the
assistance of the software, calculates risk and then advises the
clients.

According to research conducted by the institute, visitors spend an
average of eight minutes at the exhibit; museum officials had hoped for
two.

Schank insists that traditional schooling, in which the teacher
makes students complete specified tasks, is a form of bullying that
leads to abject conformity. This view has not always won him friends.
During a recent trip to Asia, it won him downright disdain. Speaking to
a delegation of Singaporean teachers, Schank told them, with his
customary indelicacy, that their school system is "terrible.''

"A thousand people wanted to shoot me,'' he says. "They think their
kids are so well-behaved and informed. But when I asked them how many
of them could still pass a basic biology test--the kind of stuff they
demand their students learn--only three hands went up. They couldn't
remember any of it. 'What,' I asked them, 'does that tell you about
your educational system? If you passed all those exams but now can't
remember anything, then you know something's wrong. We have to find a
different measure of success.' ''

The thought of Schank being asked to address ultraconservative
Singaporean educators is comically incongruous--a bit like the late
radical Abbie Hoffman being feted at a Republican convention. Massive
as an NFL nose guard, Schank is the Mr. America of the intellectual
world: impatient, noisily confident, and fiercely independent--the
living antonym of self-effacing. With a perfectly oval, bald head,
Schank is literally an egghead but an egghead you wouldn't want to mess
with. Wearing a jet-black shirt buttoned to the collar, he's Daddy
Warbucks with a slightly ominous aspect.

Even as a child growing up in Brooklyn, Schank could not tolerate
people telling him what to do. Preoccupied with one day playing
quarterback for the New York Giants, he had little interest in
classroom learning. Still, he thrived in elementary school, he says,
because "I was always the smartest kid in class.'' In high school,
however, he foundered. Teachers actually expected him to do work--work
he found meaningless--and he refused. "I quickly saw that the
successful kids were the ones who were going to do everything just the
way the teachers told them to do it,'' he says. "I wasn't good with
authority figures and was going to do things my own way no matter
what.''

After receiving his undergraduate degree at the Carnegie Institute
of Tech-nology, where he claims to have majored in "fraternity,'' he
moved on to the University of Texas where he received a Ph.D. in
linguistics in 1969. ("Only when you're in graduate school,'' he says,
"can you study what you really want to study.'') Soon the burgeoning
field of computer science captured his interest. He studied artificial
intelligence at Stanford and eventually became a professor of computer
science there. But Schank has always been much more than a computer
scientist. At Yale, where he moved to in 1974, he was a professor of
both computer science and psychology.

From the very beginning, he was concerned with the question of how
people learn; this had to be understood, he believed, if computers were
ever to become true educational tools and not just electronic
play-boxes. While psychologists understood something about human
cognition, they knew virtually nothing about computers. Computer
scientists, on the other hand, were building increasingly sophisticated
machines and programs but had little understanding of how people learn.
At best, the resulting software was useful and scintillating but
provided little information that couldn't already be found in books. At
their worst, the results were computerized workbooks--traditional
schooling with glitz.

Schank's goal, then, was to fashion a theory of learning that would
drive the development of artificial intelligence. What he and his
colleagues came up with sounds like vintage John Dewey: People learn
best by doing, by drawing from both their experiences and those of
others, and by failing.

Being allowed to fail is essential. Schools typically penalize
failure, when, according to Schank, it is the one thing absolutely
indispensable to learning. In the world of learning, there are no
command performances, only a string of endless rehearsals; we make the
inevitable mistakes, and then we correct them. As far as learning is
concerned, we would do well to remain adventurous 2-year-olds, running
around exploring this and that, getting into trouble, and then picking
ourselves up to begin the process all over again. "Computers,'' Schank
writes in a recent issue of MultiMedia Magazine, "provide novices with
a safe haven for making mistakes.''

In 1980, Schank, who was already director of Yale's Cognitive
Science Project, also became chairman of the university's computer
science department. By this time, he had long been creating educational
software. But now, as his own children struggled with school, that
quest consumed him.

"My kids were endlessly battling with the school system over the
most silly things,'' Schank says. "My kids would come back from school
with these questions, and I'd say, 'I don't know why you should do it
this way; why don't you do it any which way you want to?' Once, I was
called into school because my son, then in the 4th grade, wouldn't add
with rods. You know--blue and yellow equals green. He already knew how
to add and multiply, and he thought the rod thing was stupid. 'Well, it
is stupid, teacher,' I said.

"But it wasn't always the teacher's fault; a lot of it was the
dictated curriculum. One of my kids was forced to do syllabification.
So I went to the teacher and said, 'Why are you doing this?' She said,
'I don't know. I tried doing something else, but they wouldn't let me.'
''

This kind of frustration continued year after year. Schank's son
returned to his American high school after living in Paris for two
years and could get only B's in French, even though he was the only
student in his class fluent in the language. His daughter had similar
problems. One day, she came home complaining that whenever her teachers
spotted an essay with her name on it, they automatically gave it a B.
"I doubted that,'' Schank says, "and so I suggested that she try
writing the way the A kids did. She did that and sure enough got A's.
But she wasn't happy. 'I don't like writing like that,' she said. I
told her she had a choice: She could get A's or write as she wanted.
'I'll write the way I want,' she said, and so, once again, she received
B's.''

"Now,'' Schank laughs, "she's a professional writer.''

Schank never intended to leave Yale, but Northwestern's offer to
create and head up the Institute for the Learning Sciences was
impossible to turn down. Schank was told that he could handpick his
staff, which would allow him to add faculty from a wide range of
academic disciplines. Contracts to produce multimedia training software
for Andersen and other corporations would supply the institute with
steady funding. Best of all, he would essentially have carte blanche to
design educational software that embodied the trial-and-error learning
process. In 1989, he moved to Evanston, bringing with him many of his
Yale colleagues. The institute now employs more than 150 professors,
graduate students, re-searchers, and computer programmers.

But does Schank really believe he can build software that will
change an educational system known for its intractability? "I don't
want to change it,'' Schank says. "I want to replace it. But I know the
political opposition is phenomenal, which is why we don't run up the
middle against the school system but rather around the end. We want to
build computer-based courses the school system can't possibly reject. A
course in Japanese, for instance. There are no Japanese courses in this
country. So, schools will say, 'Gee, that's a good alternative,'
whereas if we built one in French, we wouldn't have a chance. Or how
about astronomy or a senior-level course in physics? Seniors have
already fulfilled graduation requirements, and schools don't care what
they do. Or how about a 3rd grade course in physics? There are no such
classes, but there are a lot of kids who would love to smash trucks in
computer simulations.''

When the institute designs a corporate-training program, there is
little question of what the program should teach: skills that are
needed in a profit-seeking organization. But the question is much
hazier in the world of schooling. Schank himself has forcefully argued
against an imposed curriculum. So how does he decide just what his
computer programs should teach?

Out of necessity, Schank says, the marketplace has to determine the
broad educational objectives of his software. "It's political,'' he
says. "Someone provides the money, and we have to go along with that.''
A grant from IBM, for example, led to the development of a geography
program titled Road Trip and a biology program titled Creanimate,
though Schank insists the institute had great latitude in determining
the shape the programs would take. "But what would my answer to your
question be if I could set the objectives?'' he says. "It would be 'Let
kids go where they want to go.' No one can write a list stating what
they must learn. The name of the game is to find something that will
interest them.''

Perhaps the most interesting of Schank's ideas about the nature of
learning and its relation to educational software is his all-abiding
faith in the efficacy of storytelling. In his remarkable new book, Tell
Me a Story (Macmillan), Schank, at different junctures, writes:
"Hearing and telling stories is strongly related to the nature of
intelligence''; "Performance in a conversation is an excellent measure
of intelligence''; "The most you can expect from an intelligent being
is a good story.''

Schank believes that what we know is, in essence, a compendium of
all the stories we have ever absorbed, cleverly indexed so that we can
recall them at the right times. If, for instance, we are thinking of
quitting one job to accept another, we call to mind all the stories we
have heard and read about people in similar situations. Based on our
particular circumstances, we may hone in on a story about a man who had
to decide whether to uproot his family or one about a woman who had to
decide between a fulfilling job and one that is more lucrative but less
emotionally rewarding.

But intelligence can't be determined merely by the size of one's
collection of stories and the ability to be reminded of a particular
one at a particular time. Intelligence, Schank makes clear, also
involves the ability to evaluate and act upon the stories we know--that
is, the ability to adapt existing stories to new situations. A school
principal or company manager may know many stories involving sexual
harassment, but the intelligent administrator, faced with a reputed
incident in the workplace, will only take action when he or she has
considered how certain recollected stories may or may not be relevant
to the unfolding one.

What this means, Schank says, is that all educational software,
whether for schools or for companies, should have strong storytelling
capabilities because we learn best by considering vast numbers of
stories in light of our own experiences. This storytelling dimension is
most clearly evident in the training software that the institute
produces for clients such as Andersen Consulting and the Defense
Department. One program, titled "Yello,'' turns students into sales
agents for the Yellow Pages. In one scenario, the student-agents
approach a roofing contractor and his wife who are about to pass their
business on to their son. After hearing their stories, the students
must decide on a selling strategy that takes into account the needs and
problems the stories have revealed. If they wish, the students can call
on veteran agents--all "in'' the computer--to hear "war stories'' about
selling experiences that might help them on the sales call.

"In the end,'' Schank writes in his book, "machines, like people,
will have to be the repository of extraordinarily large numbers of
stories in order to have something useful to say. Intelligence, for
machines as well as for humans, is the telling of the right story at
the right time in the right way.''

Schank freely acknowledges that it will be years before computer
programs with such exceptional capabilities are available for use in
education. Still, all of the software the institute is developing for
schools has storytelling components.

In Road Trip, a sort of geography lesson on wheels, students use a
mouse to take simulated car trips across the United States. Whether
they travel aimlessly or purposefully, they must learn the meaning of
certain cartographic symbols. When the students arrive at a particular
destination, they can see stories in the form of video clips. In
Harrisburg, Pa., for example, students may watch a scene from the movie
Witness in which Amish men raise a barn. In New York, they may watch
King Kong scale the Empire State Building or the 100th anniversary
celebration of the Statue of Liberty. The video clips students choose
to watch depend upon their interests. Current categories include sports
highlights, movie clips, amusement parks, and historical footage.

The biology program Creanimate, designed to teach elementary
students about animal morphology, works on a similar principle. The
students can create their own animals, such as a fish with wings or a
bee with a big nose. The students then view videos--capsulized
"stories''--that illustrate the animals they have created and the
purpose of the particular characteristics they have selected.

With Broadcast News, another institute program, storytelling is the
very essence of the software. In one sequence, for example, high school
students are asked to put together a news segment for March 3,
1991--the day of the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles. As assistant
producers, they must construct an unbiased account--or story--of the
event; the software program provides news text from The Associated
Press and video clips from Cable News Network. Of course, what seems
unbiased to one person may be blatantly prejudicial to another, as the
students quickly discover, since the programmers have loaded the AP
news account with questionable assumptions. The first sentence of the
text reads, "A videotape of racist police officers beating a criminal
has prompted the LAPD to investigate allegations of police brutality.''
The programmers hope words like "racist'' and "criminal'' will raise
red flags and encourage students to seek expert counsel. They might
turn to Northwestern professor of journalism (and former NBC president)
Bob Mulholland, who would ex-plain that this use of the word "racist''
would not meet his criteria for fairness. Or they might call on a
political scientist who would suggest that this use of "criminal''
could be considered both inflammatory and unjust.

As he demonstrates Broadcast News, institute programmer Frank Luksa
says that the point isn't so much to teach students about
journalism--though that is a welcome consequence--but rather to have
them explore "the issues behind the news.'' In deciding how much weight
to give a particular element of the story, the students need some
understanding of criminal law, race relations in Los Angeles and the
United States, and the protocol police are expected to follow in such
situations.

While the program provides some source and background material, the
software, Luksa makes clear, is not designed to render the teacher
superfluous. To the contrary, the teacher, depending on the particular
goals of the course, might initiate a discussion on the Bill of Rights
or the moral responsibilities of the mass media. Teachers who want to
discuss the possible socioeconomic roots of the ensuing riots might
even have their students undertake a demographic analysis of South
Central Los Angeles. In short, there is no reason why an exploration of
the subject should begin and end with the computer program.

"We know that kids like the program,'' says Luksa, noting that it is
being tested with 11th graders at a local high school. "One group was
so immersed in putting together a broadcast that they actually blocked
the door so that teachers couldn't interrupt them in their work. They
have a lot of fun with this.''

Staff members at the institute seem to have internalized Schank's
almost epigrammatic "Whatever's fun is valuable.'' While it's easy to
share their enthusiasm for the joy of learning, however saccharine such
talk sometimes sounds, one has to wonder just how long a program like
Broadcast News will remain "fun'' for students. Will it have
educational staying power, or will it, after a day or two, sit unused
in a classroom corner?

As if anticipating the question, the software creators quickly point
out that the program is an "advanced prototype'' with clear
limitations. By relating the news events of only a single day, the
software simply does not tell students enough stories. They have no
inkling, for example, of the many other stories that unfolded in
subsequent days, months, and years, such as the forced resignation of
LA police chief Daryl Gates and the acquittal of the accused officers.
Furthermore, the almost exclusive reliance on experts from the
"educated classes''--journalists, political scientists, lawyers, and
the like--conveys a sort of academic arrogance. Without the stories of
South Central residents--a black minister or a laid-off laborer,
say--the Rodney King episode loses its emotional resonance, threatening
to become an entertaining but all-too-intellectualized exercise.

Incorporating more stories into the software will address some of
these concerns. So will an "authoring'' system, currently being
developed, that will enable teachers with limited computer skills to
create and enter Broadcast News segments into the system.

At a six-week institute workshop this past summer, eight Wilmette
(Ill.) teachers and one school administrator used such an authoring
system to develop interactive programs--modeled on Sickle Cell
Counselor--for elementary school students. In one program, students
consult with arson investigators and detectives to get at the cause of
a suspicious fire. In another, students advise a disabled student who
is trying to get into a baseball game how to negotiate the crowds. In
yet another, students counsel a child dealing with the travails of
friendship. These programs are now being tested in a handful of
schools.

Generating their own concepts, scripts, and videotapes, and then
"transferring'' them into the computer, was not an easy task. In fact,
several of the participating educators say they have never worked so
hard in their lives. But they had the feeling they were pioneering a
potent educational tool. Jay Fry, principal of Highcrest Middle School,
says the only real limitations of the technology that he can foresee
are those of the people putting the programs together. And he believes
those people ultimately will be students as well as teachers. "Creating
goal-based scenarios''--the institute's term for interactive programs
requiring the sort of trial-and-error problem solving Schank so
advocates--"must become part of the goal-based scenario,'' Fry says.
"Imagine, for instance, high school kids creating computer programs for
middle school students.''

As enthusiastic as Fry is about the work he and his fellow educators
performed at the institute, he sees computers as a powerful
reinforcement of good teaching, not as the locus of any given course.
Asked if the institute's educational software was doing the sort of
things with students that teachers should be doing anyhow, Fry says,
"Absolutely.''

"Computers are a valuable tool,'' he explains, "but they're not the
answer to the so-called educational crisis.''

Hanging over any discussion about educational technology is a
question of considerable consequence: Is technology an important
classroom tool or should it become the very focus of schooling? It's a
question many educators ponder but rarely ask, fearing, perhaps, that
there will be little room for teachers in the age of computers.

Their uneasiness is understandable. Over the past few years, a
number of education critics have argued that technology should and will
play an increasingly large role in schools. At the extreme--some might
say the fringe--is Hudson Institute scholar Lewis Perelman, who in his
1992 book, School's Out, portrays schooling as an expensive
superfluity. In the world he envisions, computers, like pet dogs, are
everywhere. Whether at home, on the beach, or in the stands at a
baseball game, kids are brandishing their computers, scanning Civil War
battlefields and calculating the trajectory of a satellite on its way
to Mars.

It is quintessentially American to hanker after the new and
improved, and nothing seems more new and improved than the almost
incalculable manifestations of computer technology. Compared with it,
the teacher can seem a dusty and archaic figure. Yet there is no reason
to consider Schank's educational software, or any other software, as a
threat to teachers--good ones, anyhow.

This is not to imply that software programs like those developed by
Schank and his institute are not entertaining and instructional. What
parent would be content with their children merely memorizing state
capitals and coloring in maps when they could travel and navigate the
country using Road Trip? And who would have their children only
memorize animal group characteristics when they could use Creanimate to
discover for themselves how even the most unlikely traits can ensure a
species' survival?

On the other hand, who, with the possible exception of Lewis
Perelman, would want their children to have an education consisting
only of Road Trip, Creanimate, Broadcast News, or any other combination
of computer programs? Schank is perhaps being a bit disingenuous when
he says, "I want Broadcast News to be the whole course.'' Would he, so
critical of his own children's education, really want his kids to take
a course defined solely by a computer program? After all, Broadcast
News, as impressive as it is, cannot allow "everyone to go in different
directions,'' Schank's stated ideal. It provides a script, one that
permits students to make a wide variety of decisions, but a script
nevertheless. They can edit the existing text but cannot, within the
confines of the program, create their own.

Furthermore, there is no assurance that students will use technology
in ways that are educationally meaningful. Institute staff members
experienced this firsthand while testing Creanimate, which graduate
student John Cleave describes as usable but still in the experimental
stages. "We discovered in our testing that too many kids were watching
the videos,'' Cleave says. "The hope was that the videos would
encourage kids to work out issues pertaining to survivability, but
that's not always the case. Some 'video-hoppers' want to do nothing but
see videos, trying to turn the software into the Discovery Channel. We
have to change a few things so that kids are coerced to apply knowledge
and not just watch videos.''

Of course, if technology has limitations, so do teachers. In a given
subject area, a teacher can store and dispense a minuscule amount of
information compared with a computer. But computers are tools, and good
teachers, of course, are not. They are far too nuanced for that role,
and it is their job to respond to the nuances--the immeasurable quirks,
if you will--of the students they teach. Like Schank's ideal computer
program, good teachers are repositories of many stories that collide
and mesh with the experiences of their students. Good teachers know, in
a way a machine never can, how to ask the right questions and tell the
right stories at the right times. They are in a position to know what
makes those video-hopping students tick. They know, or should know,
something about the backgrounds of students who insist on retaining the
phrase "racist police officers'' in their Broadcast News scripts,
regardless of how often they hear the expert's sound bites.

Schank doesn't think for a minute that machines will usurp the roles
of teachers and schools. "I don't believe that anyone should be sitting
before a computer all day,'' he says. "Lewis [Perelman] seems to forget
that children are social people and that the school serves a useful
social purpose. And there is a need for authority figures--teachers
modeling right and wrong.

"But nurturance is the real key in teaching children. You need
someone who genuinely enjoys playing with the software and wants to
discuss it with the kids. What you do not need is an expert. The idea
that teachers have to be experts is from 1910. Today, the experts are
all in the box. No one could do all the physics assembled in the
machine. So, let the teacher learn alongside the children.''

In suggesting that the computer be the expert and the teacher the
nurturer, Schank is making the technophile's distinction: The computer
does the thinking, the teacher the caring. Although Schank clearly
intends no offense, it's hard not to think of the shift from
teacher-as-expert to teacher-as-nurturer as anything but a demotion. A
nurturer without some expertise is a care-giver, a custodian of the
emotions. Such a person cannot be an authority--not when "all the
experts are in the box.'' While we want teachers to be nurturers, we
also want them to be much more: We want a writing teacher to teach
writing, a history teacher to teach history, a French teacher to teach
French. We do not want them merely to sit with our kids, learning by
their sides.

But what can a teacher teach kids that a computer can't? Probably
nothing if the teacher is a bad one and a lot if the teacher is good.
The bad teacher is a textbook always going out of print; the good
teacher is a series of nuanced responses. The bad teacher knows facts
but not stories; the good teacher asks the right questions and tells
the right stories at the right times. The computer might well replace
the former, but it will only be a tool of the latter.

Web Only

Notice: We recently upgraded our comments. (Learn more here.) If you are logged in as a subscriber or registered user and already have a Display Name on edweek.org, you can post comments. If you do not already have a Display Name, please create one here.

Ground Rules for Posting
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.